STUDIO KO
ARCHITECT
Studio KO
Since meeting at the Beaux-Arts school of Architecture in Paris and the subsequent creation of their studio in 2000, Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty have applied their elementary assertion to every scale of their projects. Rooted in a classical training, the duo asserts a global and immersive approach to their profession, from architecture to interior design and furniture design. At the heart of their approach is a freedom without compromise and the need to create a unique narrative, the most in tune with the truth of the context.
Based in Paris and Marrakech, Studio KO creates contemporary public and residential architecture all over the world, inspired by the intelligence of places. Not confined to a grammar of styles or any systematic methods, the studio is defined by an attitude. An esteem for nature and existing cultures, the audacity of the broad aesthetic differences, an attention to craftsmanship and local skills, a permanent search for the rugged. For an architecture of oxymoron. Radical and archaic. An architecture with a sensibility that, from the foundations to the signature scent, reveals, without arrogance, its uniqueness and mystery.
At the beginning of each project, there is an encounter. Human, above all, from the initial conversation that takes place with a patron. Physical and sensory after, through the discovery of a site that imposes itself through its landscape and its social and economic fabric. Then comes the moment of dialogue between the elements and the experimentation of an unknown territory. Working at the edge of archaeology that leads architects to explore the site and its history in order to grasp its essence. This continued creative process allows Studio KO to find its way naturally. A prerequisite for the emergence of contemporary, appropriate and vivid forms.
Privileging primary and ancestral materials derived from the hand of man – stone, wood, metal, leather – the studio creates spaces in constant tension. The purity of lines contrasts with the materiality of the textures, the rugged with the organic, the light with the dark, the sophisticated with the bare. The vernacular simplicity with a modernist spirit. The harsh and imposing exteriors of the private villas, mineral monoliths named with a single cryptic letter, contrast with sensual and transparent interiors that engage their proprietors in a symbiotic relationship with the environment.
Each of the projects lends itself to a unique experimentation, to new encounters of textures, techniques and light. In a ‘here and now’ that invites, relentlessly, the sensitivity and the humanity.
Since meeting at the Beaux-Arts school of Architecture in Paris and the subsequent creation of their studio in 2000, Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty have applied their elementary assertion to every scale of their projects. Rooted in a classical training, the duo asserts a global and immersive approach to their profession, from architecture to interior design and furniture design. At the heart of their approach is a freedom without compromise and the need to create a unique narrative, the most in tune with the truth of the context.
Based in Paris and Marrakech, Studio KO creates contemporary public and residential architecture all over the world, inspired by the intelligence of places. Not confined to a grammar of styles or any systematic methods, the studio is defined by an attitude. An esteem for nature and existing cultures, the audacity of the broad aesthetic differences, an attention to craftsmanship and local skills, a permanent search for the rugged. For an architecture of oxymoron. Radical and archaic. An architecture with a sensibility that, from the foundations to the signature scent, reveals, without arrogance, its uniqueness and mystery.
At the beginning of each project, there is an encounter. Human, above all, from the initial conversation that takes place with a patron. Physical and sensory after, through the discovery of a site that imposes itself through its landscape and its social and economic fabric. Then comes the moment of dialogue between the elements and the experimentation of an unknown territory. Working at the edge of archaeology that leads architects to explore the site and its history in order to grasp its essence. This continued creative process allows Studio KO to find its way naturally. A prerequisite for the emergence of contemporary, appropriate and vivid forms.
Privileging primary and ancestral materials derived from the hand of man – stone, wood, metal, leather – the studio creates spaces in constant tension. The purity of lines contrasts with the materiality of the textures, the rugged with the organic, the light with the dark, the sophisticated with the bare. The vernacular simplicity with a modernist spirit. The harsh and imposing exteriors of the private villas, mineral monoliths named with a single cryptic letter, contrast with sensual and transparent interiors that engage their proprietors in a symbiotic relationship with the environment.
Each of the projects lends itself to a unique experimentation, to new encounters of textures, techniques and light. In a ‘here and now’ that invites, relentlessly, the sensitivity and the humanity.
Yves Saint Laurent Museum
Marrakech, Morocco
One thing art and fashion have in common is that they are best exhibited in windowless rooms. A new home for the collections of the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent had no choice but to keep the sun at bay: exhibition galleries, conservation areas, and auditoriums are opaque by necessity.
Each of these functions is here housed in a distinct volume, allowing the building to emerge organically as a sculptural assemblage of blocks: its external shape deriving organically from its internal functions. The result is decidedly contemporary. The interplay of delicate bends and bold strokes, of wide curves and sharp angles that characterize the design was inspired by drawings and patterns uncovered in Yves Saint Laurent’s archives: plucked from its context, the charcoal delineation of a reefer jacket’s sleeve or collar may resemble an architectural sketch or a technical draft. This composition of straight and anfractuous lines is epitomized by the central patio—a cube in which a precisely circular void has been carved out.
Despite its streamlined aesthetic, this roofless patio recalls the inner courtyards around which Moroccan houses are traditionally articulated: deeply anchored in its context, the museum could not have seen the light of day anywhere else. Hence the opacity of its facades, which protects visitors from the sun’s prodigality; the building’s orientation (exhibition spaces to the north, conservation areas underground), designed to withstand the punishing temperatures of Marrakech; and the authentic palette of colors and materials. The terrazzo that covers the floors and envelops the museum’s base on all sides, an aggregate of local stones and marbles, seems to swell up from the depths of the earth’s mantle like a mighty wave. Above, the exterior walls are clad in terra-cotta bricks produced locally from Moroccan soil in olive waste-powered ovens.
Their careful imbrication evokes the thread of a fine fabric – the facade thus becomes a garment, covering the building’s volumes with a fine lace of reds. By contrast, as with a jacket’s inner lining, the interior is velvety, smooth, and shimmery, while the outside seems woven, porous, and colorful. This requires a meticulous attention to details that honors the great dynasties of Berber craftsmen and the techniques they have passed down over the centuries.
Yves Saint Laurent was profoundly enamored with Morocco, its landscapes and its people. Not only did he spend part of the year there, but this is also where he drew most of his collections. These have now come home to the land of their birth, as if to return to the country part of what it so generously inspired.
“I knew their architectural references, their taste and, above all, their rigor. Even though they hadn’t done a museum, I knew we could work together. They listen.”
“It’s simple – I wanted something strong, Moroccan, contemporary, and, above all, absolutely uncompromising.”
Villa DL
Ghazoua, Morocco
Off to the right, a quiet seaside village. Out in front, the Atlantic. Somewhere in the middle, tall broom shrubs barely manage to cling to a narrow strip of sandy dirt swept by the northern wind – a rugged scenery, hitherto spared by developers, but threatened like anything that is beautiful and virginal.
Out of these majestic yet fragile surrounds, the villa emerges organically, like an outgrowth of the landscape, both an affirmation and a furtherance of its context. Turning their backs on this life-size postcard, the nearly windowless blocks of the house create their own center of gravity: a central patio reminiscent of the ancestral farmsteads that dot the nearby countryside, complemented by small roofless courtyards and prolonged by a refreshing pool. With the right climate, you don’t need windows to let the sunshine in.
The bedrooms open onto these intimate inner sanctums, while on the other side an elongated volume embeds itself into the sloping ground—a long stone arm to shield the house from both the villagers’ gaze and the wind that skirts the shoreline. Safeguarded by this windbreak stands a mysterious cube whose external contours don’t seem to match up with its indoor dimensions. It’s through this cube that the landscape enters the house, all the way into the central patio, thus linking the villa to the rough terrain that rolls on westward, the only view that regulations protect from future developments.
With absolute faith in the construction wisdom accumulated by generations of local builders, the villa uses the stones with which the land is strewn for purposes of structure and camouflage, while wood is stretched to its load-bearing limits over the various openings. When these become too wide, as with the two narrow horizontal slits that bisect the living room’s cube from side to side, concrete takes over, like Atlas holding up the sky on his shoulders.
The irregularity of the stones, each bearing witness to the toil of the craftsman who cut it, contrasts with the straight geometry of the blocks that make up this minimalist composition of volumes and hollows. This winter retreat and summer haven is also a modern ode to Morocco and its traditions, seamlessly bridging the gap between the vernacular and the contemporary.
“Private villas, the core of Studio KO’s architectural practice, offer eloquent but plainspoken dialogues with their remote, sometimes forbidding settings.”
Villa E
Ourika, Morocco
A slender slit, too narrow for an adult to squeeze through, cleaves the space from floor to ceiling. At the intersection of two blind walls, it admits a blade of sunlight that pans across the room over the course of the day, as in a sundial where light and dark would have switched places. This may be a modern take on the medieval arrow-slit, yet because of the window pane no archer could shoot through it: the only thing it’s meant to repel are cold fronts, much like the imposing northern wall of the villa—a reddish stone fortress for an era with no assailants to beat back. Yet behind the heavy metal door, the soft, airy interior contrasts with the roughness of the facade, much as the house’s sharp, angular edges stand out against the curves of the surrounding vales.
This gash of light serves as a kind of hinge connecting the home’s two main wings – two overlapping parallelepipeds locked in a tight embrace of the hillside. Faced with such a majestic scenery, the builder is compelled by humility to adapt to the site’s requirements instead of altering it, and the villa is as much a pedestal for the landscape as it is the other way around. Thus, the living room resembles a movie theater in which the screen has been replaced by a window of cinematic proportions, offering a minutely framed view of Jebel Toubkal, the highest peak in the Atlas Mountains.
Just as this ancient range was sculpted over the eons by erosion and the slow drift of continental plates, the villa bears the mark of time—the time required to gather each stone from around the site, to transport it by donkey, to cut it, and set it in place. A true work of patience, the house proudly displays the passage of the hands that built it, as an homage to the Moroccan ethos of craftsmanship, which venerable dynasties of local artisans have managed to preserve in spite of the world’s relentless acceleration. Somewhere between the patina of Berber artifacts, the clean and sober lines of the spaces, and the vertiginous immersion in the landscape, time suspends its course,
and the sublime finds refuge in the groove of the everyday.
“Each element carries the notion of time. The time it took to collect each rock and the long hours the craftsmen methodically placed them one after the other. The house is in itself a manifesto.”
Villa G
Bonnieux, France
A long parallelepiped of raw, thick concrete, clean-cut and mysterious, levitates over the hillside in defiance of gravity. One must come closer, through a long stone wall, gray and chalky like the surrounding hills, to detect the trick behind this illusion. Upending the vertical proportions to which the eye has been used since early times, the house’s apex is much wider than its base: the first floor is cantilevered on either side of a minimal garden level. Giving the impression of a precarious balance, while minimizing the construction’s direct footprint on what came before it, this configuration asserts the fragility and the impermanence of human interventions on the great canvas of the landscape.
From the elevated living room one dives into the pool below, and from the pool one jumps into a sea of evergreen oaks—a protected, luxuriant forest in the Luberon, not far from a tiny hilltop village. Seen from above, the grass on the green roof partially conceals the concrete’s roughness, thus mimicking the natural color palette of the surroundings, where leaves and needles provide imperfect camouflage to the dirt and rocks: in both cases, an expanse of gray with sprinklings of green on it.
The villa’s uncluttered internal layout asserts itself with clarity. In the center, a wooden volume gathers all the utilitarian areas of the home, from the kitchen through the bathroom to the closets. On either side, liberated from these down-to-earth necessities, the living room and master bedroom are free to unfurl their ample span, and the gaze takes flight unencumbered.
The concrete block’s lateral opacity is indeed offset by the wide revolving floor-to-ceiling windows at each end, which ensure the space’s luminosity: simultaneously open and closed, the villa is both a protective jewel case for its occupants’ intimacy and a belvedere overlooking a landscape that stretches as far as the eye can see, providing a tantalizing hint of the infinite. It’s as if the villa affirms that the foremost goal of architecture is to compel us to look at nature, thus teaching us to respect it, and to proclaim that it remains the first, last, and best dwelling of man.
“When a project is successful it becomes a portrait of its owner.”
Villa K
Tagadert, Morocco
A few feet to the left, the village; far off in the distance to the right, the Atlas Mountains – two settings in which the villa was compelled to fit. Echoing the old dwellings nearby, its jumble of cubic modules makes up the last layer of the village’s built environment before the great void.
Perched atop a long rocky strip of land, the house hugs the sloping terrain by sticking a garden level below the main floor. Seen from the access path below, its earthen blocks, in spite of their individually familiar and traditional outlook, create an abstract composition with enigmatic undertones, like a cubist painting judiciously placed among the works from the previous century that inspired it. After climbing an outdoor flight of stairs up to the main level, you arrive at a black infinity pool ushering in the distant view to the south. Almost perpendicular to the pool, but not quite, the house flings its floor-to-ceiling windows wide open in places allowing the gaze to traverse it all the way through, protected from the sun by a steel-and-cedar-wood awning whose streaks of shade penetrate deep into the house.
The design’s simplicity offers the occupants an intimately Moroccan experience: endless fields of wheat, a sprinkling of grazing sheep, a wadi wading its way through the centuries-old olive grove of a nearby oasis. The sharp-edged pool, a contemporary reinterpretation of the fountains that keep many a patio fresh in these parts, is also reminiscent of the ancestral irrigation pools that dot the surrounding countryside. Its slender shape seems to stretch to the point of reaching and embracing the mountainous horizon, turning it into the ultimate focal point of its own geometric composition. Devoid of ostentatious vanity, the pool gently directs the gaze instead of arresting it.
While nature changes at its own cyclical rhythm, from the young verdant fields of winter to the golden expanses of the harvest, from the dry sands of summer to the mud of rainy days, the villa remains unfazed. It’s an impassive witness to the awe-inspiring spectacle taking place all around it – a silent chunk of earth clinging to the sloping land.
“We always try to adapt a project to its place. If there’s a common thread, it’s that natural light (how it’s chiseled, how it’s filtered) becomes a kind of intangible building block.”
Flamingo Estate
Los Angeles
For Flamingo Estate in the Eagle Rock neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, Studio KO worked closely with owner Richard Christiansen, the founder and creative director of bicoastal agency Chandelier Creative, throughout a four-year process to build what Christiansen described as ‘a garden of pleasure and creativity.’
The architects left the shell of the main house mostly intact, restoring its pink stucco facades and laying a new roof of yellow, green and burgundy ceramic tiles made in Morocco. The interiors – much like Studio KO’s other work – are lavish but not ostentatious, precise but not severe. Sunlight splashes in through a wall of arched windows and shimmers on newly installed parti-colored Venetian terrazzo floors.
When they began renovating the exterior, the duo was surprised to find a greenish layer under the bleached pink, a shade they described as ‘mint syrup poured into milk.’ They were eager to replicate the effect, so they gently distressed the walls until a faint turquoise appeared through the deep Chablis.
Studio KO also constructed several small structures around the property: a laundry room, with a black-and-white mural that the British artist Luke Edward Hall painted across one wall; a churchlike office pavilion with a curvilinear ceiling and wide bay doors; and a three-story concrete cube that appears as some Kubrickian monolith. Part hammam, part sepulcher, the 400-square-foot structure holds a fireplace and a poured-concrete tub oriented toward the sunrise. Stained-glass casement windows the color of the Balearic Sea – which Studio KO first used at their Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakesh – offer views of the neighborhood below.
The trio worked so well together that they collaborated again on an art bookstore and creative hub called The Owl Bureau, located just down the street.
“Meeting those two boys changed my life. They understand how places should feel, not just how they should look. There isn’t a single blade of grass in the garden they didn’t think about. There’s whimsy and mischief, and a real sense of place and time.”
“I will never sell Flamingo Estate – it will be my home forever. But if I ever had another house somewhere else, I would only ever work with Studio KO. They’re exceptional.”
KM33
Morocco
To reach the house Studio KO made for themselves outside Marrakech in Morocco, you first drive southeast for about half an hour, then turn onto a deeply rutted dirt track that makes your SUV buck and pitch. Soon the landscape empties out, and the scattered concrete huts disappear. As the track rises toward the Atlas Mountains, it passes alongside a hidden oasis. Before long, the baked mud walls of what looks to be an empty village appear. You’re there, wherever that might be. The place has no name, just ‘Kilometer 33.’
A sprawl of small low-ceilinged rooms is arrayed around interior courtyards, with here and there a plot of vegetables, a cactus or two, some shrubbery, a shaded nook with a low sofa or a dining table where the piercing midday sun can’t get at you. Behind adobe walls with tiny windows are six bedrooms – you can tell them apart from the sparsely furnished sitting rooms by their simple beds and the wooden sticks suspended from the ceiling for hanging garments. The ceilings are bolstered by beams of palm and eucalyptus, or geometrically coffered with wood strips in a traditional south Moroccan technique called tataoui or in one room gaily painted in the colorful Berber style.
While it’s hard to discern a shared aesthetic, you can sense the basic building blocks of one in the hideaway at Kilometer 33: a worship of local materials, the poorer and rougher the better (some of the rain gutters in the house we’re in are made from tin cans, and the door hinges are cut from old tires); a refusal to add any gratuitous authorial flourishes; and unswerving fidelity to a structure’s physical and social context.
KM 33 isn’t so much a house as a giant prie-dieu—the French word for a prayer bench. But it would be misleading to call the house’s radical simplicity monastic. The place is warm, and it encourages easy living and a voluptuous freedom from daily care. The absolute aloneness, the limitless desert sky, the sun’s slow passage and its answering shadows all enter directly into the life of the house.
“The absolute aloneness, the limitless desert sky, the sun’s slow passage and its answering shadows all enter directly into the life of the house.”
“It’s not about erasing the human touch, but highlighting it. Imperfection is part of the process. It’s our language, but you can only recognize it if you can feel it.”
“We work to abolish the border between decoration and architecture. When the architecture is good, the only need is beautiful furniture.”
Centre for Contemporary Arts
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent is a new space for the development and support of contemporary culture in Central Asia. The building that will soon become the home for The Centre for Contemporary Arts was built in 1912. Before the 1917 Revolution, the venue served as a diesel power station that generated energy for the city’s tram line. This is where the electrification of the city of Tashkent began and where the renewal of Uzbekistan’s contemporary art scene environment will begin. The refurbishment of the building will start in late 2022.
“We are just very uncomfortable with buildings that are just about gesture. Conceptually and technically, architecture should endure.”
Yves Saint Laurent Museum Marrakech
Phaidon
A fascinating account of the story of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech – and a gorgeous homage to creativity.
Conceived as a candid diary, this remarkable book documents the 1,423 days that it took to design, build, and inaugurate a beloved architecture and fashion destination. From the moment Studio KO received a call from YSL’s longtime partner Pierre Bergé to the opening of the museum’s doors in 2017, one month after Bergé died, the entire process of bringing the building to life – its commission, the creative process behind it, and its construction – is told and illustrated here as never before.
The book contains a heartfelt foreword by Madison Cox, garden designer and spouse of Bergé. Cox is President of the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent and President of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle, which commissioned the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Marrakech. The book also features insights from fashion icons and members of Saint Laurent’s inner circle, including Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve.
"A warm tribute to Morocco…this elegant book traces the incredible artistic process that enabled a rough, candid sketch to metamorphose like a chrysalis into a bountiful and beautiful building."
Studio KO
Rizzoli
A debut monograph on the highly sought-after French architecture duo renowned for a signature aesthetic infused with clean lines and raw minimalism. A refreshing modernist aesthetic imbued with subtle references to history and culture defines their work. While Marty and Fournier are best known for their minimalist villas set in awe-inspiring landscapes, recent commissions also include restaurants, boutiques, and hotels across New York, Paris, and London.
The first monograph dedicated to Studio KO, this beautifully illustrated book spotlights a diverse array of their work, from private residences in breathtaking scenery, ranging from the Moroccan mountains to Provence and Brittany in France, to the highly anticipated Yves Saint Laurent Museum, due to open in Marrakech in 2017. Boasting never-before-seen architectural plans, personal photos, and sumptuous photographs of finished spaces, this book offers a fascinating look at the most in-demand architectural designers of today.
The book features a preface by Pierre Bergé and photography by Dan Glasser.
“A particularly special part of the book is its sweeping look into Studio KO’s residential oeuvre, a collection of materially sophisticated homes nestled into idyllic landscapes around the world."
STUDIO KO
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